“Here come the planes / They’re American planes, made in America”
Eight minutes long, bewilderingly experimental, and incomparable to any music that came before it. Laurie Anderson’s song, “O Superman” was never supposed to find popular success. Yet, as David Honingmann wrote in the Financial Times, “It was all gloriously uncommercial until — for a brief moment — it wasn’t.”
When it unexpectedly peaked at number two on the UK charts in 1981, “O Superman” cemented its place in the culture as a timelessly uncanny piece of art. But that’s not the end of its legacy — not even close. In the ongoing age of American anxiety, the song is as cuttingly pertinent as ever.
I first stumbled upon “O Superman” as a TikTok audio in late 2023. I remember the vocoded voice that sat like a rock in my belly: “Well you don’t know me / But I know you.” Maybe I’m just a purveyor of weird taste, but I loved how it unsettled me. I wasted no time running to find wherever the song came from.
On my first listen, something unexpected happened; I knew exactly what the song was about. I had expected to feel the trademark ambiguity that experimental art leaves for the listener and to speculate and chew on it for a bit before spitting it out. But there was a distinct immediacy to how I made sense of “O Superman.” And it’s because I’m from the US.
“Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice / And when justice is gone, there’s always force / And when force is gone, there’s always Mom”
Several moments into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the US has been branded as a nation suffering a collective loss of innocence. Whether or not that innocence ever really existed — and for whom it existed — is debatable. However, if we consider generation-defining moments like the Vietnam War or 9/11, we notice a pattern of movement from a state of business-as-usual, held in the comfort of our institutions, to a state of distress that seismically changes life as we had known it.
It’s in these moments of institutional failure that we realize there is no home to go to. The world that existed before that event is gone. Or maybe it was illusory, to begin with. “O Superman” is a prayer to authority. It’s a plea for comfort that goes unanswered.
Laurie Anderson was born in 1947 in the state of Illinois, into a version of America that no longer exists — a post-war, “mom and apple pie” America, heavy with mythos, military might, and global authority. Anderson’s formative years were defined by this image — or, more accurately — by popular culture’s desperate attempt to cling to it through the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s.
The historical backdrop to “O Superman” was a moment in which the veneer cracked: the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979–1981. The song is inspired by Operation Eagle Claw, the failed rescue mission of Americans who were held captive in Tehran. The mission ended with a highly publicized helicopter crash, which killed eight military personnel.
In Anderson’s own words, “We were left with dead bodies, a pile of burning debris, and the hostages nowhere to be seen.” The mission is remembered as an embarrassment to the US military and damaged its reputation as the world’s invincible ‘Superman.’ For an artist in this situation, the question left to ask is usually, ‘How do I make sense of this?.’ What I love about Anderson is that she rejects that notion. She leans into the disjointed nature of large-scale anxiety and gives it a voice rather than a sermon.
“So hold me, Mom / In your long arms”
“O Superman” hits close to home regarding my relationship with the US. It speaks to an unplaceable sense of dread that I’ve never quite been able to verbalize yet has lived in me for as long as I’ve been aware of the state apparatus. The song invokes images of my childhood in the early 2000s, trying to wrap my head around the War on Terror while my parents tuned in to grisly images on Fox News.
It plays in my head even today as an American living abroad. It’s the hymn of critical, dissociative introspection on the state and my place within it. It’s the hymn of American life stripped of its patriotic pomp and circumstance, leaving only a mechanical voice calling out to the ether — “O Superman / O Judge / O Mom and Dad.”
